How is your doctor going to use this robustness to get you to 100% recovery? The ONLY goal for a stroke survivor is 100% recovery. Anything less is misfeasance or maybe Nonfeasance on your doctors' part.
http://www.alphagalileo.org/ViewItem.aspx?ItemId=167140&CultureCode=en
Universiteit van Amsterdam (UVA)
The brain is well capable of coping with the erratic way
individual brain cells transmit information. This robustness is quite
useful because variation in signal transmission doesn’t merely concern
noise, but also contains valuable information. This is the finding of
research conducted by neuroscientists from the University of Amsterdam.
Their results are published in the current issue of Cell Reports.
Neuroscientists Jorrit Montijn, Guido Meijer, Carien Lansink and
Cyriel Pennartz used a special microscope to measure the activity of
hundreds of cells in the mouse brain across a period of several weeks.
They specifically focused on the part of the brain that is responsible
for processing visual input and registered the activity while the mice
were being exposed to different images.
Mood and hunger
The scientists discovered that the variability
in brain signals doesn’t concern noise, as has been assumed until now.
The activity of a single neuron in response to an image is variable and
unreliable. However, within the synchronised activity of a large number
of neurons, patterns can be distinguished that seem to suggest the value
of such variation. ‘The relationships in activity between different
neurons might provide an opportunity to states like mood and hunger to
influence how, for example, the representation of an apple is processed
in the brain’, says Guido Meijer.
The neuroscientists suspect this phenomenon isn’t only restricted to
mice, but could also be extrapolated to humans. Previous studies have
shown a strong overlap between humans and mice in the way the examined
part of the visual cortex operates.
Order from chaos
Traditionally, the variation in brain response
to a particular stimulus was regarded as something negative, as ‘noise’.
Meijer: ‘This makes sense, because if a brain cell reacts to the same
signal in different ways at different times, for example when exposed to
the image of a tiger, you run the risk of the activity being so
different at a certain point that the tiger isn’t noticed, because the
brain coincidentally registers it as a zebra, with all the accompanying
consequences. The brain turns out to be organised in such a way that it
minimises the risk of misclassification but is still able to ensure
variability.’
The team’s findings offer further insight into the complexity of the
brain. It appears that an understanding of the behaviour of individual
cells isn’t sufficient to predict or understand the behaviour of the
entire brain. ‘The brain isn’t a computer constructed from chips, which
always process a signal in the same orderly fashion’, Meijer adds.
‘Nature is more chaotic, and is apparently also constructed to
effectively manage this chaos. We have now found one of the underlying
principles that ensures order arises out of chaos on the scale of large
numbers of connected neurons.’
http://www.uva.nl/en/news-events/news/uva-news/content/press-releases/2016/08/brain-more-robust-than-previously-thought.html
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